Odyssey 3.1 · Book 3, lines 1–3
The Sun leaps into the brazen sky
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Ἠέλιος δʼ ἀνόρουσε, λιπὼν περικαλλέα λίμνην, οὐρανὸν ἐς πολύχαλκον, ἵνʼ ἀθανάτοισι φαείνοι καὶ θνητοῖσι βροτοῖσιν ἐπὶ ζείδωρον ἄρουραν·
The Sun leapt up, leaving the lovely mere, into the brazen sky, so that he might shine for the immortals and for mortal men upon the grain-giving earth.
Word by word
The setting
Book Three opens at dawn. Telemachus, guided by Athena disguised as Mentor, has sailed overnight from Ithaca toward sandy Pylos, the kingdom of old Nestor, to seek news of his father Odysseus.
A note on this passage
Book Three opens not with the usual 'rosy-fingered dawn' but with a fuller sunrise: the Sun itself springs from the water into the bronze vault of heaven to give light to gods and men alike. Three lines of pure cosmic scene-setting, sweeping from the immortals above to mortal men on the ploughed earth below.
The wide angle is the point. Before the poem narrows to one beach at Pylos and a boy's nervous errand, it fixes the whole vertical world — bright heaven over grain-giving earth — in which that small human business will happen. The same sun that lights the deathless gods is about to shine on Telemachus as he goes to ask after his father.
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